What is culture? In modern capitalism, Debord thinks that it's all about the economy. It's not just our jobs that keep us trapped, but our life outside of working hours is also demanded by "the system" via our activity as consumers, and this commoditization infiltrates every corner of our lives.

Debord wants us to WAKE UP, break our chains, and live lives of immediacy, vitality, and authenticity. This means wrenching ourselves from "the spectacle," which is not just the media created to distract us (per our ep. #136 on Adorno), but our whole shallow culture where technology, efficiency, and loss of aesthetic quality in favor of economic quantity all isolate us from each other so that we can't effectively engage in political opposition.

Is this all a bit exaggerated? Is the type of shallowness Debord refers to really restricted to the modern age, or to capitalism? Haven't we always had spectacles foisted upon us to keep us in line? Mark, Seth, Wes, and Dylan delve into this prescient critique and come up firing on all four cylinders.

Comments

I was looking forward to this episode, but I think you guys missed the overarching idea that Debord was reaching for. Of course 50 years on, and hindsight being 20/20, it is now easier to understand.

Take your example of the Spectacle of Sport, specifically as it relates to the NFL.

The NFL is Spectacle because it is now too big to fail. If you are a fan it is socially not enough to be interested in the outcome of your favorite team’s season. To be a true fan, a real fan, you need to buy all the swag: $200 jersey, hats, hoodies, coats, etc. Real fans are season ticket holders at thousands of dollars per seat.

But there’s more. The prototypical NFL fan is doing all this “voluntarily.” The insidiousness of the Spectacle is that, even if you are not interested in American Football in any way, the corporations that buy half million dollar luxury suites are paying for it with proceeds from their customers. And when cities and states fund stadiums, that too is an implicit taxing of the greater society.

Then there is the peripheral stuff like business and industry that exists because of Sports like the NFL such as Sports Radio, ESPN, multimillion dollar Super Bowl advertising.

All of this is relatively new. Look at a photo of attendees at a football or baseball game 30 or 40 years ago. It’s average people in average attire. The “fans” were engaged in the drama on the field. I say that the Spectacle isn’t that of an audience/performance relationship, it’s the sociological/psychological guilt that is perpetuated by the consumerist society that ends up enslaving us. “Global Conumer Capitalism” is, on the whole, is too big to fail. Revolution from within the system is now impossible. The “Spectacle” can only be destroyed from an outside force such as a major natural cataclysm. The irony is that that cataclysm may be a direct result of this Spectacular System itself such as Global Warming/Climate Change.

think this was covered quite well starting at around 18 mins in.
what’s missing from your own analysis is the world(s) of screens and the slicing ,dicing , and commodification of gaze/attention, not peripheral at all.

All the media slicing and dicing is just part of the gestalt of the Spectacle. The Spectacle is an ever expanding bubble more and more of us are living in. The Spectacle is broader and deeper than we can ever individually know.

The big development since he produced this work is the internet, it has furthered the alienated mode of life to the extreme edge, whereby it is almost unimaginable that somebody should live without a digital interface to their own highly edited version of the internet, mediating their relation to the world, which increases dependence on processes & technologies that have become mystical to their end users.
Things have developed to the extent that the critique of the spectacle has itself become spectacle, see Moby’s new music videos from the album, “the systems are broken” (his cashpoint card is still working), or Frankie Boyle on BBC. hell I’ve even seen people calling themselves situationists on twitter making ‘art’ installations fundamentally aligned to the spectacular order of things, creating audiences etc,.
I may be mistaken but I think the S.I anticipated this happening.
It’s the order in which things appear, life has become far more structured, uniform

It’s too much intellectual vanity, to my mind. Infatuation with and overconfidence in one’s own grand theories; which is the problem with most Marxist / neo-Marxist thought, since I’m on my soapbox. What about human agency? Doesn’t all this theory essential-ize and reduce the individual to a sheep-like automaton, going against the premises/conclusions of most of the Western philosophical tradition? Maybe there are lemmings out there, that unconsciously and consistently fall victim to The Spectacle, And maybe, even, a lot of us are embarrassingly overconfident about our own independence of mind and character.

But human beings are frequently enough unpredictable and heterogenous and ornery to cast serious doubts on the author’s (and thread commenter’s) embedded assumptions. So what if corporations use their profits to buy sports stadium suites, anyway? I didn’t buy Johnson & Johnson baby products to support their luxury entertainment needs. I bought it for the value proposition it offered, and definitely not for some fiction of vanity or conspicuous consumption. Same goes for taxpayer-funded sports facilities, by the way. That’s merely a lack of political courage, or – alternatively – a keen political eye to a community eager for a talented team to root for, and serial narrative to share in.

My socialization is in the Classic Liberal tradition, and maybe our fatal flaw is trying to treat everyone as sui generis. But voluntary behavior is voluntary at the end of the day, even if we admit we are frequently influenced by peer pressure, otherwise expectations of others’ perceptions, habitual (unthinking) reflex, and so on. Point is: Save a clinical mental illness, we each always possess the ability to critique our own position within the The Spectacle and act (or adjust our behavior) how we see appropriate.

Millions of discreet decisions made this way can conceivably change the material and fatalistic circumstances the author seems to project on us. It’s just too pessimistic a vision for me, if I still acknowledge some kernel of modest truth. Consumption for the sake of consumption (or emotional/psychic gap-filling) really bothers me too!

Now, truly Christopher, if The Spectacle bears out empirically, President Trump has to be a manifestation of as much. That is one bit of grudging, contemporary evidence I will likely concede. Or, at least, we can agree that he’s indubitably the small “s” spectacle.

The Trump phenomenon was named-dropped in this podcast episode as well, but I would love to hear/see Debord’s thesis, as it applies to our current presidency, born out / developed a little a more.

“But voluntary behavior is voluntary at the end of the day, even if we admit we are frequently influenced by peer pressure, otherwise expectations of others’ perceptions, habitual (unthinking) reflex, and so on.”
Voluntary behaviour is voluntary, but as you go on to say human behavior is not.

It is just as absurd to fancy that a philosophy can transcend its
contemporary age as it is to fancy that an individual can leap over
his own age, jump over Rhodes. If his theory goes beyond the
world as it is and builds an ideal one as it ought to be, that world
exists indeed, but only in his opinions, an unsubstantial element
where anything you please may, in fancy, be built.

To me Debord’s project was to alert us to humanity’s progression toward a consumer capitalist/technological nexus that Marx could have never dreamed of. There is virtually nothing that money cannot buy or corrupt in such a system.

So we did just have a recorded discussion with three leftist podcasters (this will be posted the week after part 2 goes up… end of the month) about our discussion and about the book to give them a chance to tell us how much we’ve missed the boat.

Surprisingly, none of them really pushed this point re. the spectacle’s omnipresence, and seemed more or less to agree with me that Debord’s picture is an over-dramatic over-generalization.

Yes, things like this “crowd-casting” or the ability for super-fans to put their entire life savings into something are pernicious, but they seem just a general version of the point that businesses are always trying to huckster people, to trick them into not only buying, but buying into, advertising, providing market research, buy based on promises that the consumer will not take advantage of (rebates, return policies with hidden catches)… my parents (children of the depression, basically) pressed on me very early that you should always be suspicious of people trying to sell you something, and the change since the 30s in the amount of opportunities businesses have for this seems to be a matter of degree and not of kind.

I think this was more accurately addressed on our Sandel episode, i.e. the 2nd one where we interviewed him about his new book. He objected to this incursion of the commercial into the rest of public life and argued that we have the right and responsibility to, through social norms and (when appropriate) government action to police our environments, so that there won’t be ads on every available inch of ground and unlimited legal opportunities for people to sell themselves (their wombs, their organs, their unwanted children, ad space via tattoos on their foreheads, etc. etc.), and the New Work lesson is specifically to apply this insight to the selling of all of our daily productive hours: that this should no longer be a social norm.

None of this would indicate that the spectacle is inescapable or even justify mystifying the phenomenon of over-commercialization as “spectacle.” What’s really useful about the term “spectacle” is when it’s actually applied to what it was meant to, i.e. forms of “entertainment” (whether created explicitly as such, or more likely claimed and pumped by the media to become such, as when we’re talking about the career swan dive of a Mel Gibson or whoever, per our Lucy Lawless episode)… It’s a social emphasis on dramatic trivia, and I think it’s a related but fundamentally different phenomenon from capitalism, as it was present in ancient times (again per the ancient Greek stuff in the Lucy Lawless discussion) and provides a tool for businesses to try to insert themselves, but they don’t really control the narrative… e.g. think of all the huge Internet memes that were not the result of businesses trying to control you, and in fact when businesses try to make their twitter pages or whatever trendy places for people to hang out and use their product, they fail embarrassingly.

I also think of the spectacle of Frozen or Star Wars or Harry Potter, in how they provide kids (and some adults) with this landscape for their own imaginations, which is of course related to and typically benefits the parent company, given all the money I spent on Start Wars crap as a kid. But even in those cases, you can’t reduce the spectacle to the business enterprise behind it; it’s just part of the culture, and in fact is NOT making kids into mindless automatons.

So we have a fan community here at PEL. Has that community magically transformed with our increasing efforts over the years at monetization? Has the product fundamentally changed? Does the fact that we’re always trying (even before money was even a possibility) to maximize our listenership corrupt the integrity of the discussions, and so Debord himself has become simply commoditized? Just because money gets involved in an enterprise doesn’t mean that the meaning of the enterprise gets reduced to money.

I agree, by degree, with 99.9% with all you have just written. I also think a lot of how Debord’s project is viewed is dependent on how much optimism or pessimism the viewer brings to the table. From my perspective Debord is concerned, perhaps overly so, about the slippery slope of the Spectacle and how contemporary or future technology tips the societal surface more towards a world where monied concerns are the most important concerns. I think an interesting example of this is in the realm of artistic endeavor. Legitimacy is most often times conferred to a writer who gets paid for her writing, or a musician who gets paid to make music. This makes it easy to fall into the trap of “more money equals better art.” Hollywood films are the epitome of this phenomenon.

In the end I’m just super cranky! Glad to hear more on this topic is coming.

Great comments on Debord, Chris. Feel free to share more on this or other topics at https://www.facebook.com/groups/The.Agora.Public.Forum/. Right now, I’m starting a discussion on The Circle, a movie based on the rise of transparanecy. I see this new development as a new aspect of the the Spectacle, though certainly with more unwieldy political implications than Debord’s original Neo-Marxist context of pure consumerist society. Would love to know your thoughts.

On De Bord’s criticism of the spectacle’s emphasis on “having” rather than “being”, there’s a connection to Frankfurt School acolyte and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm who wrote a book of that name. (‘To Have or to Be’, 1976). I know you guys did an episode on Fromm’s ‘The Art of Loving’, but I think the later book is probably more relevant to the discussion currently about neoliberalism’s demise. Love your show by the way.

[…] hour to ask some leftist podcasters what they think of Debord and of our treatment of his ideas in Ep #170. We are joined by Douglas Lain of the Zero Squared (formerly Diet Soap) podcast, Brett O'Shea of […]

[…] control à la 1984 lite. Or maybe not: the ubiquitous TV host "Buster Friendly" who best conveys the spectacle ends up being an android who has it out for Mercerism. Mercer himself (the guy climbing the hill […]

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